clean is the best way to do this, the traditional way to do this, to where we are now, which is how big a deficit reduction package should accompany it? >> well, as i think the speaker of the house is discovering tonight and is the reality that we all live with here in washington, lawrence, which is that this is a divided government. a two-party system. nobody gets entirely what he or she wants. and, yes, if we had been doing this in the normal way, as has been historically done, there would have been a clean debt ceiling vote, which traditionally has been an unpleasant vote often for members of congress, but routine and noncontroversial and certainly not tied to any kind of deficit reduction package or any other measure for that matter. what happened is that the speaker of the house made clear that -- and republicans in general that they were linking the willingness to raise the debt ceiling to significant deficit reduction. as you know, for a long time, we rejected the link. but because we believe we need to reduce our deficits and get our debt under control. we also worked concurrent